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    ‘Bill’s 44th’ Review: Where Are All the Party People?

    This poignant, comic puppet play, by Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck, is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness.There are shows so delightfully unexpected that you hesitate, when writing about them, to give anything away. “Bill’s 44th” is one of those — a poignant, comic puppet play for grown-ups about a birthday party whose guests fail to appear.Perhaps they had been to one of Bill’s shindigs before. They might have anticipated the forlorn tray of crudités, with celery sticks browning at the ends. Or foreseen that he would spike the punch to near-lethal levels, then want to bust some disco moves. With his bald papier-mâché head and thick Tom Selleck mustache, Bill is not, truth be told, the suavest of men.He is, however, enormously endearing, especially in his jaunty party hat. And in Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck’s “Bill’s 44th,” which had a brief live (and live-streamed) run last week at Dixon Place and is streaming on demand starting Tuesday, he is sweetly eager — impatient, even — to fill his solitary apartment with camaraderie and celebration.But in a wordless piece that is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness, getting ditched is not such a formidable obstacle to having company — not once the boozy punch kicks in and Bill’s imagination cuts loose.All head and torso, Bill has a middle-aged paunch that strains at his sweater. The rest of his body is built on an illusion. The hands that emerge from his cuffs belong to James and Manjuck; his legs are Manjuck’s. His isolation, meanwhile, belongs to all of us: our pre-vaccine pandemic selves, having to make do for so long without the people we wished would surround us.Let me stop right here and tell you that this not-quite-hourlong show is buoyant, mesmerizing, joy-inducing — and that I’m about to wreck some of its more winsome visual surprises, which you might prefer not to see coming. Should you read the rest of this review? Maybe not, if you’re planning to watch “Bill’s 44th.”Because this is also a show about the nature of puppetry, and puppets, it turns out, are all around us. That tray of crudités? Bill rustles through the carrot sticks and finds the makings of a cheery orange friend he dubs Cary. With drawn-on eyes and smiling mouth, this is a guest for Bill to clink plastic cups with. Soon the party balloons get faces, too, and social dynamics come into play. It’s only when Cary turns human-size that things get really wild, though, and Bill has a partner to dance with. (Jon Riddleberger rounds out the excellent team of puppeteers.)With jazzy music by Eamon Fogarty and dreamy lighting by M. Jordan Wiggins, “Bill’s 44th” plunges its audience fully into a fantasy that, for all its silliness, leads its hero through stubborn hope and bitter disappointment toward a feeling of comfort in his own skin and an awakening to the world around him.This isn’t the birthday that Bill had hoped to have. But for the audience, his 44th is a gift.Bill’s 44thAvailable on demand June 8-15; dixonplace.org More

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    Bruce Springsteen Will Return to Broadway in June

    “Springsteen on Broadway” opens on June 26 at the St. James Theater; audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination to enter.Bruce Springsteen is returning to Broadway.“Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which ran for 236 performances, including seven previews, in 2017 and 2018, will open on June 26 at the St. James Theater, at 246 W. 44th Street, and have additional performances through Sept. 4, according to an announcement. As of now, the show will be the first to open on Broadway since the pandemic shut down performances in March 2020. While some Broadway productions have set return dates as early as Aug. 4, most have targeted mid-September for their reopenings.Tickets go on sale Thursday at noon Eastern time through SeatGeek, the show’s official ticket seller. SeatGeek, a challenger to Ticketmaster, has a deal with Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates the St. James as well as the Walter Kerr Theater, where “Springsteen on Broadway” had its initial run.Although Broadway theaters and producers have said they plan to reopen their full lineup of shows after Labor Day, the speed of vaccination, and promising downward trend of coronavirus cases in the United States, have encouraged many performers and producers throughout the entertainment industry to move forward quickly.According to the show’s announcement, audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination along with their tickets to enter the theater. Entry times will be staggered, and attendees will be required to fill out a Covid-19 health screening within 24 hours of the show.“Springsteen on Broadway” — which had its genesis in a private performance at the White House in January 2017, in the closing days of the Obama administration — is a mostly solo show by Springsteen, drawing from his catalog of hits and his 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” The show weaves in stories from throughout Springsteen’s career, with insights into how he wrote songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” (His wife, Patti Scialfa, joined him in some songs.)The show was a blockbuster hit, selling $113 million in tickets and playing to a total of 223,585 fans. It was also filmed for a Netflix special of the same title, which went online shortly after the last performance in December 2018.Proceeds from the opening night of “Springsteen on Broadway” will be donated to a number of charities, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monmouth County in New Jersey, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Food Bank for New York City. More

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    How Lin-Manuel Miranda and Friends Made an Old Bookstore New

    The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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    ‘Run the World’ Is an Ode to ‘Enviable Friendships’ and Black Harlem

    This Starz series about four women “walking into real adulthood,” as the creator described it, is broadly appealing but unmistakably based in Black women’s perspectives.For nearly three decades, Yvette Lee Bowser has created, produced and written for television shows that portray women who have what she calls “enviable female friendships.” More

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    Peek at Broadway Comeback: Times Event With “Me and the Sky”

    When The Times staged a musical number for its live event series, the performance served as a sneak preview of a theater world preparing for takeoff.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March, Zoe Gertz, an Australian actress, was asked by The New York Times if she would be interested in singing the soaring anthem “Me and the Sky” for an episode of its Offstage event series, which examines the theater industry during its pandemic hiatus. The number is from the Australian touring production of the 9/11 musical “Come From Away.”After teams worked on in-house music and stage direction, Ms. Gertz belted the ebullient anthem to the rafters of a simple stage at Her Majesty’s Theater in Melbourne, sans audience but backed by six musicians and five castmates of the production’s female ensemble. And it all came together in just over two weeks.“I am suddenly aliiiiiive,” Ms. Gertz sang with an irrepressible smile as she told of her character’s love for flying.The sentiment seems to be spreading. Broadway’s reopening will now occur in August. In Australia, “Frozen,” “Hamilton” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” were running at or near full capacity in Sydney and Melbourne for months (though masks were still required) until a recent lockdown in Melbourne put shows in that city on hold again. The performance for the Times event served as both a reminder of theater’s vitality during the pandemic and a preview of the energy to come.The musical number began to take shape in early March after The Times’s theater reporter, Michael Paulson, suggested recording a special video of the inspirational song for the Offstage series, which streamed live on April 29 and is still viewable by Times subscribers.“We wanted a song that was both good and would make sense out of context for people who hadn’t seen the show,” Mr. Paulson said. “It’s also a song that works without a very elaborate band or orchestra and is essentially a solo number.”The four-and-a-half-minute track chronicles the tale of the real-life American Airlines pilot Beverley Bass, who was among the pilots with planes full of passengers who were diverted to Newfoundland on Sept. 11, 2001.“One of the many emotions captured in this song is Beverley having to come to terms with the job she loves being put on hold, and not knowing when she might fly again,” said Rachel Karpf, the director of programming at The Times who helped plan the event with Beth Weinstein and Rachel Czipo. “We saw some parallels to the experience of theater workers in Australia and around the world this past year, as their industry was brought to a near-total standstill by the pandemic.”Ms. Karpf said the Events team began discussing ideas for the episode in early January with Mr. Paulson; Scott Heller, then The Times’s theater editor; and Damien Cave, the Sydney bureau chief. Mr. Cave and Mr. Paulson were working on a story about the return of Broadway shows in Australia, which has been much more successful at containing the virus than the United States. More

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    Clarence Williams III, a Star of ‘Mod Squad’ Is Dead at 81

    He portrayed Linc Hayes, a hip undercover police officer who was teamed with Peggy Lipton and Michael Cole. Clarence Williams III, the reflectively intense actor who starred as Linc Hayes, a young, hip undercover police officer on ABC’s “The Mod Squad,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 81.The cause was colon cancer, his manager, Allan Mindel, said.“The Mod Squad,” which ran from 1968 to 1973, was one of the first of its kind — a prime-time network series that focused on members of the hippie generation at the same time that it exploited them.The show had two ad taglines. “First they got busted; then they got badges” summarized the show’s back story: three hippies in trouble with the law who then joined the police force as plainclothes cops with built-in disguises — their youth and their counterculture personas.The second — “One Black, one white, one blonde” — referred to the cast: Mr. Williams, Michael Cole and Peggy Lipton. Mr. Williams was one of the first Black actors to have a lead role on a television series.Aaron Spelling, the show’s producer, never liked Linc’s Afro, Mr. Williams recalled in an NPR interview in 1999, so the style was toned down. A bit. For a while. Then, each week, he said, “we’d tease it out a little bit more.”Clarence Williams III was born in Manhattan on Aug. 21, 1939. His father, Clarence Jr., known as Clay, was a musician. His mother is omitted from his biographies. Asked about her on Sunday, a family member declined to give her name and described her as “largely absent.” He was raised by his paternal grandparents.Although “The Mod Squad” made Mr. Williams a symbol of the Vietnam War generation, he actually served in the military just before that era. He was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in the late 1950s.His interest in acting began when he visited a Harlem Y.M.C.A., where his sister was working, and dropped in to watch a play’s run-through. By the end of the evening he had been cast in the production.He began his acting career on Broadway, where his grandfather had appeared as early as 1908. The young Mr. Williams appeared in three plays, including “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” (1964), for which he received a Tony Award nomination and a Theater World Award. The New York Times review offered high praise.“Mr. Williams glides like a dancer,” Howard Taubman wrote, “giving his long, fraudulently airy speeches the inner rhythms of fear and showing the nakedness of terror when he ceases to pretend.”Mr. Williams played an F.B.I. agent on “Twin Peaks” in 1990 and appeared in many films and television series after “The Mod Squad” ended.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesHe owed his screen career to Bill Cosby, then a rising star. Mr. Cosby saw him on the New York stage and recommended him to Mr. Spelling, who was casting “The Mod Squad” at the time.Mr. Cosby was the first Black actor to win a leading role in a prime-time American series, “I Spy,” beginning in 1965. Diahann Carroll starred in the sitcom “Julia” three years later — the same season that “The Mod Squad” began.After the show ended, Mr. Williams dropped out of sight for a while, expressing disappointment in the kinds of roles available to Black men. He returned to Broadway, appearing as an African head of state, with Maggie Smith, in a Tom Stoppard drama, “Night and Day” (1979).Beginning in the 1980s, he had a busy film career. He played Prince’s abusive father in “Purple Rain” (1984) and Wesley Snipes’s heroin-addicted father in “Sugar Hill” (1993). He was a crazed blackmailer in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and a wild-eyed storytelling mortician in “Tales From the Hood” (1995). He had small roles in the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988) and in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987).Television brought Mr. Williams new opportunities too. He was a leader of the Attica prison riots in HBO’s “Against the Wall” (1994); a segregationist governor’s manservant in the mini-series “George Wallace” (1997); Muhammad Ali’s father in “Ali: An American Hero” (2000); and a retired C.I.A. operative in 10 “Mystery Woman” movies (2003-07). He did guest appearances on close to 40 series, from “Hill Street Blues” to “Empire.”His other film roles included a much-too-loyal aide-de-camp in “The General’s Daughter” (1999), a glowering criminal who is set on fire in “Reindeer Games” (2000), an old-school crime lord in “American Gangster” (2007) and a White House servant’s older mentor in Lee Daniels’s “The Butler” (2013). His last film was “American Nightmares” (2018), a horror comedy.In 1967, Mr. Williams married Gloria Foster, a stage actress who appeared twice on “The Mod Squad” and later played the Oracle in “The Matrix.” They divorced in 1984.He is survived by his daughter, Jamey Phillips, and his sister, Sondra Pugh.Mr. Williams often contended that he didn’t take being a role model that seriously. “All of this is escapism, fantasy,” he told TV Guide in 1970, early in the run of “The Mod Squad.” “This is what the box is about.”In the same interview, though, he recalled being happily mobbed by young Black fans at a basketball game and acknowledged, “It’s kind of nice for kids to see a reflection of themselves.” More

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    Lights, Camera, Run! Behind the Videos of Mayor Candidates

    What did it take to record videos of eight Democrats who are vying to lead New York City? Collaboration, hustle and a willingness to talk to ambulance drivers, for starters.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On June 22, New Yorkers will go to the polls to choose the Democratic candidate who will very likely be the city’s next mayor. After a chaotic year, many voters are, understandably, just tuning in now.As a politics producer on The New York Times’s Video desk, I spend most of my time thinking about how we can use original visual reporting to bring additional depth to key races and issues. For this project on the mayoral race, our goal was to help readers get to know a big group of contenders in a way that was clear, informative and fun.Last month, we digitally published our final product, an interactive set of videos featuring interviews with the top eight Democratic candidates. The interviews, conducted by the Metro reporters Emma Fitzsimmons and Katie Glueck, along with photography done on set, inform a print version of the project that appears in Sunday’s newspaper.When we started planning, we knew that the race had a number of distinct qualities we needed to take into consideration. First, many of the candidates were not well known to those who didn’t closely follow city politics. This was also the first year New York City would be using ranked-choice voting — in this race that means voters can rank up to five candidates on the ballot. (A full explanation of how this voting will work can be found here.)Our team included Metro editors and reporters, designers, graphics editors and video journalists. The initial idea for the piece was based on past Times projects that focused on Democratic presidential candidates in advance of the 2020 primaries. (here and here). The core idea was simple: Bring in the candidates, ask them all the same questions and publish their answers in an interactive format that allowed readers to “choose their own adventure” and navigate through topics of interest.We wanted to give these interviews and the project a New York City feel, so we selected two different spaces in The New York Times Building where we could use the city as a backdrop.Emma Fitzsimmons, The Times’s City Hall bureau chief, on set for an interview with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesOur interviews were set primarily in natural light, which can pose certain challenges. Ideally, an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best, because you want light to hit your subject evenly. A cloud that moves in front of the sun and casts a shadow on your subject’s face can ruin a shot. This meant closely tracking the weather and cloud movements with Noah Throop, our cinematographer, in advance of every shoot. On bad weather days, we filmed in the Times Center auditorium, which was less susceptible to light change.We also had to navigate the challenges of filming during a pandemic, meaning we needed to find large open spaces and set up testing regimens and safety protocols for both staff members and guests.Shaun Donovan, a mayoral candidate, on set. When filming in natural light, either an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesBehind the scenes, we coordinated with the campaigns in an effort to catch each candidate arriving, which at times meant running through the Times Square subway station, trying to scout for their vehicles in traffic and looking to confirm whether Andrew Yang and his team were in fact having lunch at Schnipper’s (a burger joint in the Times building) before his interview. The cameras were rolling from the moment we met up with candidates outside until the moment they left the building.The author looks out for Mr. Throop in the Times Square Subway station.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe decided to make one video per candidate, instead of organizing videos by topic, to give viewers an opportunity to sit and listen to a particular individual if they desired. The interviews ranged in length from 40 minutes to more than an hour based on the candidate’s speaking style and brevity.The videos on Kathryn Garcia and the other top seven Democratic candidates were organized so that viewers could sit and listen to a candidate at length. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMy role during an interview as a producer is to focus on how everything will look and sound on video. This means that the array of things I do includes listening for good sound bites, monitoring what questions might need an additional take, fixing people’s hair and running outside to ask ambulance drivers on a break to turn off their flashing lights (which I had to do numerous times during these shoots).In editing down the interviews, we tried to highlight what made a candidate unique and pull out key differences among members of the group — along with some moments of levity. But ultimately what we wanted to provide was a resource where voters could hear from each person, relatively unfiltered, to help them make up their minds.Who Wants to Be Mayor of New York City?The race for the next mayor of New York City may be one of the most consequential elections in a generation. Here are some of the leading candidates vying to run the nation’s largest city. More